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not gods* After wards, while the four men were asleep , the gods 
made for them beautiful wives, and from these came all the 
tribes and families of the earth. 
47. Here we have the same tradition as ours, with the evident 
loss by time of some of the consecutive events. It is not a 
created fable, or it would abound in the marvellous, as we find 
is the case in Oriental cosmogonies, while the excessive paucity 
of material, as in the several oceans of salt water, sugar-cane 
juice, wines, clarified butter, curds, milk, &c., described in the 
Puranas, shows how difficult it was in early times to invent a 
tradition. Nor could two such similar accounts originate in 
those primitive days spontaneously when theses were unknown; 
whereas it contains all the panels of the picture — if I may so 
express it- but some of the portraits so faded, that the restorer, 
not knowing how to replace them, simply kept repeating the 
principal event in the blank spaces, and at each step of distance 
showed a stage of less perfection than the complete one.f But 
we have our six panels intact ; we have the exact description 
of events before the present condition of the earth, a precise 
counterpart of that in Genesis, consonant with the plural 
Elohim, and the Spirit of God moving on the face of the 
waters, and which, together with the brevity and power of the 
expression “ they said,” is emphatic. Our third and sixth 
pictures, of the appearance of the earth, and the creation of 
man, are perfect. As to the four men created, this is clearly 
confusion between the creation of man and the four men re- 
puted to have peopled the earth after the Deluge, thereby 
giving us a combination, and so far a corroboration of the uni- 
versality of more than one tradition still retained amongst us. 
48. In fine, then, I can but attribute these universal customs to 
a like universality of such traditions, as you will already have 
recognized; and see, in the worship of the sun, a transmission 
of the very oldest traditions found in our own, i.e. the Hebrew 
records. J Thus fire, the symbol of sun-worship, is represented 
* “ Man is become as one of us.” 
t To this may be added that the Persian tradition of the creation, in their 
oldest language, gives also six periods or stages of creation, and that man is 
represented as. the being created on the sixth day. 
u fj ^ lle . is clear that the Hebrews were the descendants of those who 
held the earliest, as well as the purest traditions and customs which they 
solemnly revered and practised, it is manifest that these were transmitted 
orally, and not reduced to a written formula till the time of Moses. Still an 
author of deep research asserts that Bin Washih had collected a great variety 
of alphabets, and even some which he supposed to be “antediluvian.” We 
know not what was lost by the destruction of the Alexandrian library, but 
it is remarkable that the cuneiform and other inscriptions, which we have 
now access to, deal largely with the subject of the Flood, and this style 
